I read this and I thought of you.

I found myself in a conversation recently about giving customers what they want – rather than letting them try out new things.  The thing is, customers don’t know what they want.

Nobody knew they wanted a steam engine before George Stephenson created his Rocket.  They were happy transporting goods in trucks pulled by horses and people in painful carriages.

Nobody knew they wanted a vacuum cleaner before Hubert Cecil Booth turned up with one.

Nobody knew they wanted to organise their worlds so much with a personal computer until … well, I’ll let you decide which of a cadre of visionaries saw, and wanted, the possibility – Steve Jobs is in there very early.

And no one knows they want the amazing thing you have to offer until you bring it.

So don’t wait for people to ask for your genius, just bring it – whenever you can and wherever you can.

I know, I know, I keep talking about how amazing people are, about all the amazing things you can do.  You want to ask how’s this possible?  Or, tell me to get real, to live in the real world.  Life is busy, there are things to do, bills to be paid.

I guess I’m trying to offer a bigger picture for where you are, right now.  How everyday you have the opportunity to get up and live an adventure.  After all, we get one life with which to do this, and then it’s gone.

Think back to when you were young.  What did you want to be?  A footballer?  A singer?  A chef?  An astronaut?  A writer?  An artist?  (A train driver?)

You used to have dreams which were big and bright and shiny.  How come?  Who told you that you had to do this?  You imagined something and then you played at it?

What happened as you got older?  Did the the hopes change?  Now you want to become a hairdresser – I really did (and got an apprenticeship that lasted for three months – I was rubbish).  Or maybe a bank clerk or a shop assistant or lawyer (or train driver).  There’s nothing wrong with any of these jobs, unless the lawyer wants to be a bus driver, and hairdresser wants to be a life-coach, and the excitement of getting a new job and securing income wears off into a routine that robs you of your dreams and hopes.

Humans want things.  From an early age they dream about becoming* someone, doing something.  We push ourselves, stretch, practice, learn, skill-up, try and try again, fail, innovate.

It’s still there, isn’t it.  Maybe deeper, covered by a load of good, bad, and indifferent stuff?  It can be uncovered, this dream of yours.  It may transform your job, or it may be something the income from your job finances.  There may or may not be an external reward.  The internal reward, the one which comes to you every day you get out of bed, is the satisfaction of of living your adventure.

* Sadly, for too many children in our world, dreaming and imagination is stolen at a very early age.  In his book Too Small To Ignore, Compassion‘s director Wess Stafford tells of his encounters with children in Haiti:

If you asked them to do the simplest thing, they would
respond, “M’pa kapab” (“I can’t” or “I’m not capable”).
… Another common phrase was “M’pa gagne” (“I don’t
have,” meaning “I don’t have anything you need or 
would want.”).

(Cartoon inspired by Hugh MacLeod)

Whenever you’re reading this in the day, have you had any time to reflect and be silent?

Did you hit the bedroom floor running, radio on, check emails and mobile, rush for the bus, scrape the ice off the car.

Has it stopped yet?

Are you still running?

I’m encouraging more reflection towards greater responsiveness whenever I get the chance.  Your emerging future depends on finding time to reflect, but I can’t tell you when or where or for how long.  That’s your adventure.  And it is an adventure; you wake up to it every day.

Maybe, just maybe, when you find that space and time, your days will begin to look different and you’ll wow us with your art, because you are identifying what you MUST do with the rest of your life, bringing more beauty into the world.

Do you read blogs which reinforce what you believe and do?

Or do you read blogs which are inspiring?

Maybe you read posts which encourage you to move?  Change your mind?  Read a book?  Join an action group?  Start something?  Deliver something?

I think most people want to do something meaningful for others with their lives.  Some wait for opportunities to come to them – some call it luck, others fortune.

Others know stuff the rest of us don’t appear to.  That is, to put in effort changes the game.  They realise with hard work and lots of practice, more “luck” or “fortune” or “opportunities” turn up.

And there’s another benefit.  If you wait for a break to come your way, the chances are you won’t recognise it or be able to grab it.   For those who work for the opportunities, there’s been loads of stuff which hasn’t worked – but they get better at seeing the opportunities – and, in the last year, though lots of things have failed, there’s been plenty that has worked – which means they’ve grabbed the opportunities.

I’d made myself a note to write a post about castors, after reading about d.school‘s practice of attaching castors to all their furniture, making it possible for them to move everything in their creative spaces (I read this in Make Space – a book I’m enjoying much).

It got me thinking about what would happen if we could add castors to our lives, making everything movable – the things we know, how we do things, where we go.

What would these castors be?  Reading something new (or old, sometimes, as Nassim Taleb encourages us), watching TED videos, getting together with others in conversations with purpose (check out the local Meetup possibilities), even getting up a little earlier in the day to get more done – all these and more are ways of adding wheels to our lives.

What do you think?

Skimming through the years –
Life is big and bright and bold
Deep down – beyond me

The design and innovation company Ideo asks the question Why? five times when it’s working on something.  They go deep.

When I was a volunteer assessor for the Institute of Advanced Motorists, I’d ask the driver to share a driving commentary with me.  The commentary allowed me to know how far ahead the driver was seeing, their readings of the instruments, and what they knew to be behind us.  The IAM takes drivers deeper.

What about your life?  If you’re always in a rush, are you  skimming, rather than going deep.

The problem is, life isn’t fulfilling when we skim.

The world’s problems aren’t solved when we skim.

Otto Scharmer (Theory U) suggests this way of living carries the mantra, I-in-me.  Me in my little world.  But I can stop skimming, suspending how I see and understand, becoming more curious, and then I find I can go deeper.

Now my living bears the mantra, I-in-it.  There’s a bigger world out there.  I’ve mentioned before how author Umberto Eco possesses a library of 30,000 books, most of which he hasn’t read, but they remind himself of how much he doesn’t know.  If I enter into the world of what I am observing, then I can go deeper still: to see and understand it from within.

Now my living mantra is I-in-you.   I begin to see something as you see it, how you comprehend it,and how it feels to you.  My world grows bigger still, and I begin to see emerging possibilities for how we can act, how I can act, which I couldn’t see before … and I go deeper still.

Now my living mantra is I-in-now.  I see how I can act and think and do.  I get to try things out (prototyping), and then produce what is meaningful and generous and hopeful.

So, going deep isn’t to get stuck in complexity but to find freedom.

Of course, it’s difficult and sometimes scary and the temptation is to keep on skimming, but to really live before we die, we have to go deep.

(Inspired by Hugh MacLeod’s Start Up)

Loanees of energy
Every day to shape – form
Play, skip, try, fail – boom

What are you going to do today that’ll be amazing?

You don’t have to wait until you have everything you think you need.  You have enough, right now.

You have something you’re passionate about.  It’s there, in your head and in your heart, every day.

It doesn’t have to be something big.  In fact small is good, very good.  It’s about movement.  When you’re moving, others will begin to move too.

David Kelley of IDEO charges us to ‘Fail often to succeed sooner.’

So, when you start something today, even if you fail, you’ll know more at the end of the day than you know right now.  To know this means you’re closer to succeeding at something that will take our breath away.  And, who knows, it might happen first time.

If you want the technical stuff to this, read on, and let me know what you think.

THE TECHNICAL STUFF, OR, THE ART OF PROTOTYPING

The stuff I do – dreamwhispering – is about listening for the things people’s lives are saying to them, but perhaps they can’t here.  It’s being curious about life, including, how there’s more to you than meets the eye, what you understand, and what you do.

I’ve mentioned Umberto Eco’s library of 30,000 books before; he hasn’t read them all, but they are a constant reminder to him of how much he doesn’t know.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi warns, ‘The rebirth of curiosity doesn’t last long, unless we enjoy being curious’ (Creativity).  Hence, my opening question is about what you’ll do today.

The universe is all about energy (from protons and electrons to Higgs bosons).  We are loaned some of this energy – being made up of the same “stuff” as everything else in the universe –  for seventy or maybe eighty years.  For a limited period only,  we have an incredible opportunity to shape and direct our energy into a life that matters, before we die and it loses this intelligent form, becoming part of the universe’s energy-store, or something more or different.

It makes so much sense to me, to speak of our Strengths as the things which energise us, and our Weaknesses as those things which de-energise.  So, what if there’s the possibility of living this one life with more energy?   And, what if this life will make a difference to others?  What kind of effect might a more energised life have on conflict and disease and illiteracy and hunger and all manner of needs in the world.

I know I’m on a journey to deeper seeing, understanding, and doing, meaning, to be more present to the world in which we live, to others, and to myself.  So often, I rush, I skim the surface more often than not.  As I seek to be more present, I see and understand there are more possibilities for life, what Otto Scharmer (Theory U) refers to as the emerging future, a future we get to shape with “foresight, intention, and love” (Alex McManus).  I think of this as the adjacent possibility (in truth, there are many), the realisation we can live everything we are right now, in a different direction.

Through this journey or process of presencing, we become clearer about the thing we MUST do.  The world will be changed by the people who realise there is something they MUST do.  But we mustn’t hold back until we feel ourselves read, we must begin experimenting, which returns us to the opening question, “What are you going to do today that’ll be amazing?”

We’re going to prototype.

Otto Scharmer suggests to us, ‘Prototyping is the first step in exploring the future by doing and experimenting’ (Theory U).

Principle 0.8 comes before version 1.0, because not everything’s ready or in place – but we have enough.

Scott Doorley and Scott Witthoft describe how to shape creative space in their book Make Space, but they describe all prototyping:

Starting with what you have encourages you to start small,
move quickly, invest less, be visible to others, and build
momentum.’ (Make Space)

You don’t have to know everything.  Bob Goff introduced me to a sailing concept called “dead reckoning” which gives an approximate position: ‘The idea is a simple one. … It involves using your compass to take a bearing off a couple of fixed points and then drawing from each one to you in order to determine where you are’ (Love Does).  This provides a position within a 60 mile diameter, but to get started, this is enough.

Scharmer asked his friend Joseph Jaworski how we can remain connected to the emerging future, so whether we call this Principle 0.8 or prototyping, here are three things we can do.

First of all, Jaworski says, “you need to do it on an daily basis.  As a matter of fact, it’s the first thing you do when you get up in the morning.”  Figure out some way in your beginning of the day habits to reconnect with your passion, what you MUST do.

“The second thing you focus on is staying true and connected with that deeper intention all the time, throughout the whole day or week or year or even longer.”  Have ways and means of bringing this to mind throughout your day, and you’ll find it becomes first nature, fully integrated into who you are.

Thirdly, Jaworski counsels, we must “sense and seize opportunities as they arise.  When they arise, it usually is not exactly where you expect it to happen.  So you have to be totally attentive.”

(All of these quotes are from Theory U.)

I leave the final thoughts to the two Scotts, understanding our lives are the spaces they are describing:

Keep your space active by using it.  Visible signs of use
can encourage others to participate.  These traces of
excitement also signal new ideas.  Stagnant areas, piles
of unused materials, and unattended corners and closets
drag down the mood of a space. (Make Space)

In his book The Business of Belief, Tom Asacker tells of some studies relating to teachers’ perception of their students, how when the teachers  were led to believe their students were bright, it led to the students performing better.

Interesting.

It’s a story about believing.  Firstly, the believing of the teachers, and then the believing of their students.

You could say, the students had been learning underperformance.  But now the world is different.

Our growing understanding of what it means to be Human highlights a paradigm shift has taken place.

Yes, leaders have to believe in those they’re responsible for, but every one of us has the opportunity to encourage another to greater performance, and we simply don’t know how far people can improve.

If we don’t see this and believe this, then all we’re doing is encouraging underperformance.

“If your actions inspire others to dream more,
learn more, do more and become more, you
are a leader.”  (John Quincy Adams; The Business
of Belief)

Freedom is the ultimate option – Nassim Taleb (Antifragile)

What’s the opposite of fragile?

Most people will say: sustainable, solid, robust, resolute, resilient.  Nassim Taleb argues robustness is the ability to sustain or regain form or identity in the face of stress and volatility.  But some things thrive on stress and volatility.

We’ve heard of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but what about PTSG?

Post traumatic stress growth.  My friend Rebecca came across this condition working with women affected by the conflict in Uganda.  Our heads tell us it shouldn’t be so, but it exists.

Taleb’s triad: Fragile-Robust-Antifragile.

The question is, how do we move from fragile to robust to antifragile?

I’ve been thinking about this because my circumstances are going to be changing – through choice – and I know fragile won’t be enough ‘when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors’ (Antifragile), but I don’t want to stay in the same place – robustness.  As I think of the possible scenarios I catch what Taleb has to say about options over obligations.  Obligations inhibit me and make me fragile.  Options – maybe like a dandelion has options – are what give me freedom to move and adapt and fail and keep moving, so over the next few months I’m going to be asking plenty of people to help me identify options.

For what they’re worth, here are three starting points I’m exploring: humility (accepting who I am and what I can do, including my potential – Icarus was advised not to fly too close to the sun and not too close to the waves – and to know myself is to have options); gratitude (thankful for all I have in my life by way of people and things, and being surprised by joy in each new person and artefact coming my way – appreciating how their value provides me with options; and, faithfulness (to keep turning up doing the things which matter and add worth – people want me to turn up with energy: I like the word alacrity – focusing on energy in the things which matter offers options).

This is the beginning of my journey on this path towards antifragility; things are beginning to emerge which I’ll share another time.

But, what do you think?

Here’s something sent in by my friend Charlotte:

We live surrounded by noise.  It can define us, if we’re not careful.  And it will always make life smaller, require we fit in.

There’s one way to make sure this is not how it is for you: Be the Noise.  Figure out what it is you MUST do and do it, everyday, with alacrity.  May your noise be bright.

Spread the word.